Dave Carson, Heavy.com, on user-generated content
with
Heavy.com
Dave Carson, co-CEO of video site Heavy.com, says that the key to successful user-generated content may be in giving users a purpose.
Transcript: Dave Carson, Heavy.com, on user-generated content
UGC feels like a term that was made by the industry because it was, and it is. It's nothing that the consumer necessarily says: "I'm a user generated content provider." It just makes no sense. But beyond that it feels like there's still a lot of growth in the area, but in terms of how people are looking at making it right now feels a little done. Everybody's got a contest, everybody's making videos, and so forth. So what's the next level? How can you actually do something interesting with real people making their own content? How can it be something other than just a contest?
Well I think that there's probably a more longer term value in UGC coming from the users themselves with their own networks. For example, take Justin.tv. A really interesting example -- a guy puts the camera on himself, and puts himself up on his own website. You essentially get to live his whole life through his cameras. That's also going back to an old idea. If you remember We Live in Public, circa 1999-2000, it's sort of a re-tread of that idea. Now the technology is there. It's more ubiquitous. So that I actually thought was pushing it a little bit further. It wasn't necessarily about just a contest with a bunch of users. It was about someone really laying themselves on the line creating their own little reality show themselves. I though that was a nice way to push it. Beyond that I think we're seeing a lot of advertisers who want to get into it, and want to know, as a company and as a brand, how can they be involved? Some of them are a little ham-fisted. They feel forced. And some of them feel like they're very organic. And it's the organic ones that feel the best to the public, or to the user. And that just comes from class of creative. There are good ideas and there are bad ideas. There are good executions and there are bad executions. So I think there's still a lot of room for improvement, which we haven't even seen yet. And there's probably going to be a lot of failure as well, which I'm sure we ll see a lot of in the media before we see the success.
Where we came from, we actually had some success early on with a client, with Burger King. And Burger King was actually a fantastic client. They came to us and said what can we do with your users? And we'd like to do something original, and go out there if you can. You want to have a client like that. So we actually gave away their king masks. And we gave them to a lot of users that like to upload videos for us. And they went out and made videos. And they were crazy. They were very interesting. And that was actually very successful. There might be another campaign that's just like it, and you kind of have to do something different. We can't do the mask thing, we can't give masks out to people anymore, so what's the next level that we can do? So we're always looking for what can we do next that can be even more original than the one that we did prior. But success that we see from the users -- we see them uploading a lot of videos. We see success when they start communicating with each other. And there's also a lot of success when they feel like there's a real goal that's actually attainable, whether it's something they're winning out of a contest or even if they're getting the most votes or the most videos or so forth. But winning seems to be something that's very successful. If there's a goal of somebody winning, those tend to do the best. The ones that kind of meander, where there's no point at all, they don't necessarily work all that well. Film festivals are nice, but if there isn't a winner at the end, it seems like people are having a hard time figuring out what the goal is.
If people get fatigued on the concept, it's because everybody in the industry has sort of failed to capture everyone's imagination. So everybody thinks it might be the next hula hoop or the next fad. "Myspace is the next fad." Well, we've proven that maybe it isn't just a fad. Social networking is something that's here to stay for a little while. "Reality television -- that's just a fad." Well that's been around now for a little while. So as long as it continues to evolve, and stay interesting, then I think it will be around. It's really dependent on the publishers and the media companies and the creative agencies to sort of evolve the genre.
